1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to controls of a triggered Secure User Plane Location (SUPL) session, and more particularly, to methods for a SUPL Location Platform (SLP) and network-side SUPL Agent to pause and resume an ongoing triggered SUPL session.
2. Description of the Related Art
Location Based Services (LBS) related applications are becoming more and more popular in today's mobile markets. For mobile subscribers, using LBS related applications on mobile phones (also known as cellular or cell phones), smart phones, laptop computers with wireless communications capability, or other mobile devices, require a user's location to be available as quickly and accurately as possible. Although the Global Positioning System (GPS) has been the main solution to this need for several years now, it has its limitations. Generally, the GPS works fine in rural areas but often works barely in urban area or in buildings. Thus, it is commonly proposed to supplement the GPS with assistance and positioning data provided by the networks employing other positioning methods. The assistance and positioning data can be exchanged between the mobile phones and the networks over either the control plane or the user plane. A control plane implementation uses a dedicated control channel, and this approach has been used for emergency services, such as the E911 mandate in the United States. However, it also adds significant network overhead, due to the software and hardware changes needed to various network components to support the location-specific messages. To this end, the user plane implementations have grown in popularity in recent years for non-critical commercial location applications.
As one of the user plane implementations, the Secure User Plane Location (SUPL) was developed by the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) to support Location-Based Services (LBS) for wireless communications in various wireless technologies, such as the General Packet Radio Service (GPRS) technology, Enhanced Data rates for Global Evolution (EDGE) technology, Wideband Code Division Multiple Access (WCDMA) technology, Code Division Multiple Access 2000 (CDMA-2000) technology, Time Division-Synchronous Code Division Multiple Access (TD-SCDMA) technology, Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access (WiMAX) technology, Long Term Evolution (LTE) technology, LTE-Advanced technology, and others. A basic SUPL architecture is composed of a SUPL Location Platform (SLP), a target SUPL Enabled Terminal (SET), and a network-side SUPL Agent, wherein the SLP is an entity responsible for Location Service Management and Position Determination, the target SET is a logical entity in a device that is capable of communicating with a SUPL Network, and the network-side SUPL Agent is a software and/or hardware entity accessing the SUPL enabler in order to obtain location information. According to the OMA-AD-SUPL, v 3.0, specification, the OMA-TS-ULP, v 3.0, specification, and the OMA-TS-MLP, v 3.3, specification, pause and resumption of an ongoing triggered SUPL session is only defined to be initiated by the target SET. However, there may be situations where the network-side SUPL Agent and/or the SLP may have to initiate pause and resumption of an ongoing triggered SUPL session. For example, during an on-going triggered SUPL session which is a periodic session for the target SET to report its position to the SLP every 5 seconds and to stop reporting after 5 hours, the target SET will periodically report its position according to the setting, even if its position seldomly changes or doesn't change at all, and a lot of reports indicating the same position result will be sent to the SLP. As the SLP may generally have many different SUPL sessions on-going simultaneously with different target SETs, it is therefore desirable for the SLP or the network-side SUPL Agent to have the capability to pause or resume one particular on-going triggered SUPL session (e.g. to pause for 30 minutes and then resume), so that the traffic loading of the SLP may be efficiently reduced.